Global Agenda gets massive with Open Zones

Earlier we showed you some of the new gear Global Agenda: Sandstorm is adding, and how you're going to pay for it. Now it's time to show you what you have to do to get it: questing.

Well, you don't have to quest, but come on, it's an MMO. Global Agenda is embracing its massive mantra with the upcoming addition of Open Zones, included in the upcoming 30-days-from-now patch which also brings the crafting boons. These open zones function just like a zone in any MMORPG, with camps filled with NPCs with exclamation points over their heads and a pile of baddies waiting outside city limits to get pummeled, and are supposed to be a stepping stone between the basic tutorial and the more frantic, intense missions.

The first quest I did (located in a zone with enough content to take players from level 5 to 15) was called One Man's Trash and revolved around the typical MMO task of venturing 20 feet and killing whatever poor creature wandered within range. This time my victims were “colony drones”, soulless robots who no doubt deserved a swift death if I had bothered to finish reading the quest text.

Of course there's also plenty of new missions in the Sandstorm updates as well, including a solo mode that allows you to choose one of four difficulties, the highest of which the developers themselves are only having a 10% success rate with at the time of E3.

Team missions have six levels of difficulty and can be tackled with any size party, with loot scaling appropriately—for example, tackling a medium level mission with two players will net you the same quality gear as a ultra-max level mission with 4 players.

The patch scheduled for 30 days from now will be introducing 10-man PVE missions that revolve around defending Dome City from enemy invasion. The patch slated for 60 days from now will raise the ante even higher with 32 vs. 32 player battles on bigger maps than PvP has seen before.